Newtown: A Ghastly Sign Of Progress?

Writing from the UK, reader Roger McCarthy points out that one reason the Newtown massacre shocks us so profoundly is that thanks to medical advances, better technology, and other examples of progress, we live in a society that is no longer nearly as acquainted with death:

In 1927 every human being was an order of magnitude closer to death and tragedy – few children would graduate from school without having lost one or several classmates to diseases and accidents, any male over 28 was quite likely to have seen unimaginable horrors in the trenches, factory fires and mine disasters and train crashes and shipwrecks claimed not single but tens and hundreds of lives with depressing regularity….

To lose a child is now an almost unimaginable nightmare for every parent – but you only need to take a walk around an old graveyard or investigate your own family history to see that for our great grand-parents generation losing one, more or even all of one’s children was horribly common.

Those people back in 1927 were in no sense better than us morally -in many respects they were much worse in their tolerance for racism and bigotry of all kinds – but they were more callous (in the literal sense of being spiritually calloused by loss after loss and injury after injury), more fatalistic and above all more realistic about what human beings could and could not do and even if they had never heard of Doctor Johnson had his words imprinted on their souls:

‘How small of all that human hearts endure. That part which laws or kings can cause or cure!’

We cannot ban evil by decree. And this truth, says Roger, should temper our response to Newtown:

The idea that ‘we’ (all of us? 99.999% of whom never have or will entertain even for a second the idea of slaughtering a school-full of small children) would or should be driven to ‘reform ourselves’ in answer to every public tragedy would have seemed completely absurd to forefathers who knew that there had always and would always be true monsters living amongst us who no pious platitudes could preach away.

And lets face it nothing will be done – and even if as in Europe you had a political system that allowed for instant kneejerk responses (here in Britain a dog can’t savage a child without media clamour for yet another Dangerous Dogs Act even though unaccountably stupid people continue to breed vicious dogs and they continue to bite irrespective of how many times Parliament forbids them) nothing that would be done would prevent a clever or just determined psychopath from periodically doing what psychopaths do.

This, of course, is cold comfort to the grieving people of Newtown. But it’s true, isn’t it?

As I’ve mentioned here, in 2010, Trevor Reese, a teenage boy from a well-off family living in a country-club housing development near my town jumped out of the bushes with a knife in his hand, set upon an eight-year-old boy pedaling his bike behind his parents, and butchered the child. The killer, who has pled not guilty by reason of insanity (his trial begins in early 2013 — and I was told by someone who had visited him in jail that he appears to be quite insane), made good grades, and came from a churchgoing, upper-middle class family. Though we perhaps will learn more in the trial, it seems as this point that nobody could have foreseen this coming; a (likely) mentally ill teenager snapped, with devastating consequences for an innocent child, his family, and (to be fair) to the family of the killer.

The lawyer representing the killer concedes that his client did it, saying that the case has never been about what happened, but why it happened. In the Adam Lanza case, there may not be a why, other than mental illness, in which case establishing a line of causation is difficult. Are we going to outlaw insanity? Are we going to prevent law-abiding people from owning weapons because someone in their family might go insane and kill others? Should the Reeses not have been allowed to have knives?

Thats called a perverse incentive, blairburton, kinda like paying people not to work. The more you pay for somehtig, the more of it you get.

Then there’s this thing called ‘feminism’. In short, this Frankfurt School invention/perversion claims that women should–must–pursue their ‘happiness’ at all costs, but that the effect of divorce on children doesnt exist: children do not need fathers and losing one doesnt hurt them. Yes, thats hat they claim, over and over. And don’t f’ing ask me for my ‘source’, Google it yourself, you dunce.

How do you know Lanzas x didnt want to be fully involved in his sons life? How do you know he didnt want to divorce?

Lanzas mother wrecked her family. Then chose to stockpile arms, take her kid the firing range, pull him out of school…all the while knowing he was mentally ill.

I’m still waiting for the howls of compassion and urgency from the White House and the media.

Note also that a number of mass murderers were already under psychiatric treatment, or on cocktails of psychiatric medicine. Plus the violent people who killed after being released by order of psychiatrists. (Ditto child molesters.) And we’re told that more psychiatry–not incarceration–is the answer.

Perhaps the Adam Lanzas would have taken killing more seriously if the government, the courts, and the psych industry did.

(Quote from a very senior mental health professional I once spoke with about his job: “You don’t want psychiatrists reporting to you. They’re all crazy.”)

There is only one purpose for a semiautomatic assault rifle. One purpose for high-capacity clips. One purpose for semiautomatic pistols that hold more rounds than you can count on two hands.

That purpose is to kill people as quickly and efficiently as possible. Unless you’re a target shooter who’s too frackin’ lazy to reload or find yourself engaged in urban combat amid complete societal collapse — or the Zombie Apocalypse — I can’t think of a legal use for that kind of firepower.

Do those scenarios represent an improvement over what we face now? Yes. This is a cultural and societal problem you have to chip away at. Reasonable gun control is one chip off the block.

Another would be strengthening commitment laws for those judged to be a danger to themselves or others. Yet another would be beefing up mental-health services and making them easier to access.

Yet another would be a cultural jihad against violent rap music and blood-soaked video games.

You say we used to be more desensitized to death back in the day, and that may be true. But what we are today is massively desensitized to killing, and that’s a different and far worse thing than being accustomed to, and unshocked by, death. If we don’t address it, we’re going to wish all we faced was a mere Zombie Apocalypse.

Alternatively, we could just all take the Louisiana approach to things — make regulation of firearms all but legally impossible while decimating social services and mental-health care for entire vulnerable populations most likely to need it.

Richard Johnson, are those lower IQ brown illegal aliens being exploited by elites?

Further, are the costs of this nu-age elite exploitation of browns being passed on to lower and middle class whites? Do you think that this elite exploitation of browns is at odds with the Cavalier exploitation of black slaves? Do you have an irony deficiency?

It links the right to bear arms on the necessity of a well-regulated militia – so you form one on the model of Switzerland and effectively restrict ownership of firearms to members of that militia.

Well Roger McCarthy that’s because the Second Amendment is not about a militia and never has been. Legal and English scholars have written that the militia clause is in no way a restrictive clause. This is based on other documents at the time and common English then.

There are two cases brought to the Supreme Court regarding the Second Amendment. In the Miller case a man with a sawed off shotgun claimed the 1932 NFA was unconstitutional. The Miller case decided nothing because it was remanded back to the lower courts. The SC did not reject Miller for lack of standing even though he had no connection to a militia. So even then they knew the second had nothing to do with being in a militia. They did try to keep the NFA alive by making the ridiculous argument that there was no evidence presented at trial that Miller’s shotgun was suitable for use by a militia. The very idea that there is some kind of “militia weapon” is as dumb as it gets – but that lawyers looking for an out for you. Short barreled shotguns were used as trench guns in WWI.

In Heller the SC explicitly said the second is about an individual right, which 90% of Americans probably already knew.

In no way do I intend to diminish the horrible, violent deaths of the children and adults in Newtown CT, but a different phenomenon in the US claims the lives of 28 children under the age of fourteen EVERY SINGLE WEEK. That phenomenon is the automobile accident.

Rod hits the critical point: What I am opposed to is the misleading notion that we can rid the world of chaos and evil through better legislation. The best we can do is improve our odds, but even then, the criminally insane and the just plain evil will find a way to do what they’re bound to do. To believe otherwise is to lie to oneself.

Let us review a few things that are true and have always been true in the US — if not adhered to or enforced consistently (a very different kettle of worms):

No person can be found guilty of a crime without a trial or pleading guilty before a judge.

Every alleged perpetrator of a crime, with no exceptions, is protected by habeus corpus and due process laws.

With very recent exceptions — about all which we should be very concerned — no one can be arrested because they might commit a crime.

All of that said, with a short list of other things left unsaid here, the most important point is that we live in an open society where there is not one legal guarantee or implication that crime will be prevented. In short, bad things can and will happen to people. The only path to “prevention” leads us to a police state where no one can even sneeze without a government official taking notice. I would argue that the Second Amendment was drawn as a specific protection against that exact police state as it existed in the colonies under British rule.

Fast forward to today, and giving little attention to the paranoid statements of survivalists and such, we still have an open society in which crime happens.

The question I want answered is that next logical step after all the knee-jerk reactions and legislative rushes to look good for the next election. It can be rationally answered only after the grief and anger has run their courses. Do you want a police state?

If you can honestly say “no”, then your next honest step is to oppose any legislation that takes us down that path, and start with examining the Patriot Act and recognizing how it has take us several leaps down that path without any real improvements to our daily lives.

I am a father, uncle and first-time grandfather. My task is to prepare the next generation as best I can for all the possible vagaries of life, not to protect them from them. No parent wants his child to face death, and no parent should expect our government to participate in a doomed effort to keep them ignorant of it.

BradleyP brings up the vehicular analogy. I try very hard to avoid argument by analogy, but as some here already know I have a passionate view of driving behaviors and their consequences.

In this country, and in particular if you live within easy distance of a major highway, you can witness crimes being committed every day. Our government has driven major initiatives concerning vehicular safety standards, vehicular safety technology is honestly astonishing, and people still die in traffic incidents.

The people who routinely drive over the speed limit, who tailgate and swerve around slower traffic, who ignore school zones and cheat on traffic signals, are behaving in ways that demonstrably lead to deaths of themselves and/or others. Only a total police state could possibly stop them from driving that way, and the only time they stop on their own is if they are convicted of a vehicular crime or die in an accident they caused. And even in that former case, they have lawyers who cry “you’ll take their livelihood away!” or “they have a family to support!” or some such excuse to let them continue driving.

So, those of you who will insist on taking preventative steps around firearms, look at the numbers, especially for under the age of 18. Will you go after the criminality of vast numbers of drivers next? If not, why not? If our open society demands that you not pass anticipatory laws, and you decide we must anyway, are you prepared to live in a police state?

I have a deep respect for life. I never condone wishing harm to another person no matter the provocation. Nonetheless, admitting both my own potential for hypocrisy and how difficult that all is, with my 300 miles per week commute, I catch myself thinking about one or more drivers per trip “well, that idiot won’t desist unless something horrific happens to someone he loves… and maybe not even then.”

And I would question whether we are in fact desensitised to death – the reaction to this tragedy and the horribly similar one in Dunblane and to 9.11 and the tsunami and the Oklahoma city bombing and so on and on suggests the exact opposite.

How many people reading about that Bath School massacre in their newspaper in 1927 stopped what they were doing and burst into tears as I and I am sure so many of us have done again and again and again when faced with terrible images and words on television?

Did Calvin Coolidge go on radio and falter reading the victims names?

Did canting clerics proclaim that it required nothing less than a complete moral regeneration?

Even our violent rap music and video games (but not it would seem the endless police procedurals and true crime documentaries that fill our TV schedules with horrors that it would once have been considered pornographic to write about in such grisly detail?) are to my mind a product of of this sensitisation to death – an attempt to control and exorcise the fear and pity it arouses through constant ritualised repetition made necessary by death becoming largely something that is in Debord’s sense a spectacle (‘all that was once directly lived has become mere representation’), rather than the personally familiar and omnipresent thing it was to our ancestors from before the age of mass media, modern medicine and health and safety laws.

As I keep saying there is no meta-solution to this at all – the world is as it is and both the masses and the elites have clearly decided that they are happy with it and will no longer allow any utopian projects for saving us from ourselves.

And so we must see the violence and destruction increase with each passing year and decade until finally it all collapses and the gun nuts and survivalists are finally vindicated as they become the absolute masters of everything they can shoot and steal.

Alimony is rare, limited mainly to the 1% types where the wives have no careers or work history to fall back on. I’ve known plenty of divorces among my friends and family (mainly middle or working class folks), and, yep, nasty child support stuff in some of them, but I’ve never known a single person who received or paid alimony

I take the Second Amendment seriously, as I do the First Amendment. It can’t be wished out of existence, and it shouldn’t be, because there were important reasons for ratifying the amendment. I believe the Heller decision made the right call. One of the underlying points to the Second Amendment was that people need the ability to defend themselves. Even in the present high-tech era, it can take police long enough to respond that several people could be dead before they arrive.

A well regulated militia in an important reason for the right to keep and bear arms. A militia is not a self-appointed bunch of people running around playing war games with no accountability. But neither is it the National Guard. The national guard units were created for the purpose of taking military mobilization OUT of the hands of a citizen militia. The militia, called out to suppress strikes and other labor actions, tended to down guns or join the union members (which is exactly the kind of restraint on government tyranny intended by the Second Amendment).

All that said, free speech is subject to time, place and manner restrictions, as long as they don’t suppress any particular opinion (the legal term is “viewpoint neutral”). There is room, without undermining the Second Amendment, for reasonable time, place and manner restrictions.

It is well established that the owner of private property has the right to forbid weapons on their property. That in itself punches a hole in the “open carry” exhibitionists.

To establish criminal penalties for carrying weapons in public in crowded urban situations is not unreasonable. Obviously if all civil order has broken down, this and dozens of other laws will be inoperative. But in the course of ordinary civilian life, its reasonable and arguably not a violation of constitutional rights. Leave the guns at home, where the gun owner will carry the primary benefits and risks.

In rural areas, this might be silly. Johnny Sixteen may go out hunting early in the morning, then drive in to school just before the bell rings with two hunting rifles strapped to the roof of his pick-up (ammunition stored in the glove compartment). Driving down twenty miles of unsettled roadway, one might feel a need to have a weapon available in case of emergency. It might take the police HOURS to respond to a 911. There are in between situations as well, of course.

Arguably, assault weapons are exactly what a well regulated militia needs. But they might be reserved to a reconstituted militia, and might be kept locked up in a local armory, with the firing pins locked up in a separate location.

Details can be worked out, and a few more Supreme Court litigations are almost inevitable. But its not a choice between freely carrying loaded assault rifles on the morning commute, or repealing the Second Amendment.

Arguably, assault weapons are exactly what a well regulated militia needs. But they might be reserved to a reconstituted militia, and might be kept locked up in a local armory, with the firing pins locked up in a separate location.

The British came for the gunpowder in the armory. Putting assault weapons in an armory just means the government helicopter has to land there to make sure the militia is defenseless. If the militia is the people’s protection against an out of control tyrannical government, the militia cannot be disarmed so easily.

Even the Swiss system that people like to talk about allows the weapons to be kept inside the home.

If I remember correctly, most Swiss are required to keep them. But there is some sort of accountability for how they are used.

This is a two-edged sword. Complete absence of control frees criminal gangs to use their assault weapons freely. Complete control denies citizens any option to defend themselves against tyranny. The difference between gangs and militia is not easy to define as a matter of law. Some drug gangs in Mexico have started to style themselves “la resistencia.” Some political organizations degenerate into gangs. Its hard to know WHAT the FARC in Columbia is now, although it began as a legitimate revolutionary effort and along the line got into some degree of drug trafficking.

Yes, if we’re going to talk about an armed militia, we have to talk about all these possibilities. We can’t simply say “the good guys should have guns, but nobody else should be allowed to.”